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How an embattled energy storage project in Acton, California, is threatening faster federal permits.
One hour north of Los Angeles, the small town of Acton is experiencing a battery energy storage buildout — and quickly becoming the must-watch frontline in the backlash against lithium-ion energy storage systems. The flashpoint: wildfires.
Like many parts of California, Acton has hot summers with heavy winds, putting it at elevated risk of the kind blaze that makes national headlines. Battery storage fires, while rare, are a unique threat, with relatively little data available about them to help regulators or the public understand the risk. People in Acton wondered: Would they really be safe if a wildfire engulfed a battery storage site, or if a battery failure sparked a new conflagration?
When L.A. County blessed the first battery energy storage system project in Acton last year, developers and local fire officials said they were doing everything in their power to ensure the batteries would meet safety standards. Residents were far from convinced.
“This will turn our community into industrial hell and it’ll erase us from the face of the Earth,” Jacqueline Ayer, a member of Acton’s town council, told me. Ayer is helping lead the local fight against the projects.
I’ve now spent more than a month researching the fight in Acton. In the process, I’ve learned how much — or little — we know about when battery energy storage and wildfires mix. We’ll get to that later in this story. To be honest, debunking battery fire risk wasn’t why I spent a month on Acton. It was what happened when the fears took hold.
Feeling they’d been failed by both the regulatory approval process and the court system, the Acton project’s opponents turned to their representative in Washington, House Republican Mike Garcia. Though Garcia can’t do anything to stop this particular project, he can severely hinder future ones: As Heatmap can exclusively report, after lobbying from Acton, Garcia inserted language into the annual funding bill for the Department of Energy that would block it from implementing a new rule designed to expedite permits for federally funded battery projects.
“What we’re hoping is that [with Garcia] being at the federal level, he’ll shed some light to the people at the top,” said Ruthie Brock of the activist group Acton Takes Action, “because if the top becomes informed, it’ll trickle down to local governments.”
This is why the Acton fight is so important — it demonstrates the risk of failing to obtain community buy-in, which can ricochet in ways no one intended. The political and media environments are quick to sensationalize the downsides of renewable energy, creating a tinderbox atmosphere in which small local fights can quickly become national ones.
On some level, a fight over battery fires going national was inevitable. Across the country, from New York to Washington state, communities are revolting against battery energy storage sites coming to their backyards. Often, those opposed cite the feared threat of fires or explosions.
Fires in battery energy storage systems, a.k.a. BESS, are quite rare. According to what data is available, the number of fires has stayed relatively flat even as deployment has grown drastically. There were fewer than 10 failure events in the U.S. in 2023, and there have been even fewer so far this year.
But when a fire does happen, experts say it can be quite difficult to put out. In some cases, there’s nothing a community can do other than let the blaze run.
“There’s a lack of consensus. There’s a lot of experts out there providing guidance, and that’s something we’re trying to work on with training throughout the country,” Victoria Hutchinson, an engineer with the Fire Protection Research Foundation, told me. “[It’ll] instill some fear in the meantime we figure out the best approach.”
Information on BESS and wildfires is even less available. Guillermo Rein, a professor of fire science and the editor-in-chief of the journal Fire Technology, told me the matter has not really been studied.
“When I say [BESS are] new, I mean really new,” Rein said. “We hardly know how it works when it gets [on] fire and we don’t have many technologies that are proven to work. We have technologies that we wish will work, but proven technologies that work are very rare. That means we have a new hazard we are struggling to understand and in the meantime, we don’t know how to protect against it.”
Los Angeles County approved Acton’s first battery storage system — Humidor, a 300 megawatt project by Hecate Energy — last summer through an expedited “ministerial” process, the local equivalent of a “categorical exclusion” under the National Environmental Policy Act. Ministerial reviews and categorical exclusions are used by regulators to skip the drawn out process of an environmental review because they can reasonably predict a lack of significant impact. Joseph Horvath, a spokesperson for L.A. County Planning, gave me a statement defending the approval and stating BESS projects must meet all local and state zoning and fire codes to receive a ministerial approval.
California had identified the Acton community back in 2021 as a potential site for energy storage to protect against future power shut offs. Acton made sense because it’s close to the SoCal Edison Vincent substation, making it well positioned to connect to the grid. There was also a real sense of urgency: To achieve its goal of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045, the state estimates it will need to install a projected 52,000 megawatts or more of battery storage. Humidor is the first of what appears to be multiple projects being planned for the area, including two more Hecate facilities according to materials on the company’s website.
Convinced that a battery boom could mix poorly with extreme fire risk, and that the county moved far too fast to approve Humidor, Acton residents sued. The county, they argued, had little reason to conclude the facility would have an insignificant impact on the environment — so few BESS projects have been approved that the county used the standards from a different kind of project — an electrical substation — to draw that conclusion. L.A. County Planning told me they chose this comparison for reasons including the “purpose of BESS and its connection to the larger network for distributive purposes.”
Rein told me that at least when it comes to the fire risk, this isn’t an accurate comparison, and that there’s not actually enough data to claim such a facility would have an insignificant impact. “I would put great efforts into making sure this facility is safe,” he said. “They can’t just say, I met the regulation, I did enough. Because it’s a new hazard.”
Many of those in Acton opposed to the project believe the approval was rushed, and claim that little information was made available to the public as it was going through the county’s process. Furious residents have told county planners that the Acton town council was not notified in advance that an approval was on its way. They testified before the county board of supervisors that Hecate held only a single public meeting to discuss what it intended to build, with little notice given to potentially concerned citizens.
In my experience as a journalist reporting on large energy projects with serious community impacts, transparency is key to getting local buy-in to build a project. For years I covered the mining industry, where innumerable decades of toxic waste spills and labor scandals have forced companies to really innovate and spend serious dough on obtaining “social license to operate,” a term developers and investors use to describe acceptance to a company’s business practices.
This, of course, differs from the YIMBY school of thought that companies and governments should eschew frustrated municipalities to pursue the overriding net good of climate action. There are certainly merits to this argument, especially when it comes to communities that won’t take yes for an answer, and we’ll be exploring case studies supporting that view in future editions of The Fight.
I’m on the fence about whether Acton is one of those cases, though. Ayer, an environmental engineer by trade, told me she supports decarbonization and wants to see climate action happen. She just wants to feel assured the technology is safe.
If it wasn’t a lithium-ion battery storage facility “I would feel comfortable,” she said. “We will shoulder some of the weight. But it isn’t right that we shoulder all of the weight.”
When I tried to talk to Hecate about Acton’s wildfire concerns and how the company had engaged with the community, a company spokesperson, Bobby Howard, declined to make anyone available for an interview citing “ongoing litigation related to the subject.” Howard provided a factbook that said only that Humidor would “meet or exceed” local and state fire codes — without specifying which codes — and detailed some of the outreach the company did, including the public meeting as well as mailers to “thousands of individuals throughout the greater Los Angeles area, including civically engaged individuals throughout Acton.”
Howard declined to answer questions requesting more information about the company’s public outreach and wildfire planning. He did tell the Los Angeles Times earlier this year that Humidor would have “seismic bracing, safety zones around the perimeter, substantial setbacks from parcel boundaries, gravel breaks and a masonry wall around the facility.”
Stanford University senior research scholar and legal energy expert Michael Wara explained to me that in cases like these, having buy-in from the community is important to avoiding litigation and social blowback. “That is losing,” Wara said. “You have not served your client if you end up in litigation.”
“Having a process by which people are informed about a project and have an opportunity to provide input is important for buy-in for all kinds of projects related to the energy transition if you want to build in a democratic society,” he said. “Is it really the fire risk the community is concerned about?”
When it comes to the Acton battery fight, it’s the fears of fire that scare me the most, not the fire itself.
I sought reasons to be optimistic about putting battery energy storage in areas like Acton that are prone to wildfire because, well, California is essentially one big fire risk zone. James Campbell, a wildfire policy expert at the Federation of American Scientists, told me that battery energy storage decreases net wildfire risk compared to gas storage tanks and pipelines. “If we consider the whole-climate trade-offs, battery systems are much safer,” he said.
On its end, Hecate claimed in a letter to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors that a BESS fire has never traveled off-site, and that because the fires are fueled by flammable gasses, there is minimal risk of embers traveling elsewhere and igniting grass or bushes. The company pointed me to this letter when I reached out for comment.
“Nothing about fire risk mitigation is about certainty. It’s more, risk mitigation and fire is kind of like wearing a seatbelt,” Wara told me. “If you’re going 120 miles an hour down the highway and you get in a high-speed collision, your seatbelt will not save you. [But] there’s rapid advances in how these systems work.”
In the end, he added, meeting California’s carbon emissions targets will “probably mean building somewhere that there is non-trivial wildfire risk.”
What’s happening to offshore wind should be a cautionary tale for developers considering whether sinking time and money into community relations is really worth it: Last year, coastal fishermen and beach town mayors in New Jersey joined forces with fossil fuel funding and right-wing agitators to foment a conspiracy-infused campaign against offshore wind that has truly rattled the future of the industry.
Part of that offshore wind backlash grew out of New Jersey Republicans in Congress using the pulpit of their offices and filing amendments to legislation. As Garcia takes up Acton’s cause, I do wonder whether battery energy storage might be next. November’s election makes it less likely his language hindering expedited approvals for BESS projects will make it into the final funding bill, and Garcia’s office did not respond to requests to discuss its prospects.
But regardless, it’s an ember that could become a fire of its own.
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Amarillo-area residents successfully beat back a $600 million project from Xcel Energy that would have provided useful tax revenue.
Power giant Xcel Energy just suffered a major public relations flap in the Texas Panhandle, scrubbing plans for a solar project amidst harsh backlash from local residents.
On Friday, Xcel Energy withdrew plans to build a $600 million solar project right outside of Rolling Hills, a small, relatively isolated residential neighborhood just north of the city of Amarillo, Texas. The project was part of several solar farms it had proposed to the Texas Public Utilities Commission to meet the load growth created by the state’s AI data center boom. As we’ve covered in The Fight, Texas should’ve been an easier place to do this, and there were few if any legal obstacles standing in the way of the project, dubbed Oneida 2. It was sited on private lands, and Texas counties lack the sort of authority to veto projects you’re used to seeing in, say, Ohio or California.
But a full-on revolt from homeowners and realtors apparently created a public relations crisis.
Mere weeks ago, shortly after word of the project made its way through the small community that is Rolling Hills, more than 60 complaints were filed to the Texas Public Utilities Commission in protest. When Xcel organized a public forum to try and educate the public about the project’s potential benefits, at least 150 residents turned out, overwhelmingly to oppose its construction. This led the Minnesota-based power company to say it would scrap the project entirely.
Xcel has tried to put a happy face on the situation. “We are grateful that so many people from the Rolling Hills neighborhood shared their concerns about this project because it gives us an opportunity to better serve our communities,” the company said in a statement to me. “Moving forward, we will ask for regulatory approval to build more generation sources to meet the needs of our growing economy, but we are taking the lessons from this project seriously.”
But what lessons, exactly, could Xcel have learned? What seems to have happened is that it simply tried to put a solar project in the wrong place, prizing convenience and proximity to an existing electrical grid over the risk of backlash in an area with a conservative, older population that is resistant to change.
Just ask John Coffee, one of the commissioners for Potter County, which includes Amarillo, Rolling Hills, and a lot of characteristically barren Texas landscape. As he told me over the phone this week, this solar farm would’ve been the first utility-scale project in the county. For years, he said, renewable energy developers have explored potentially building a project in the area. He’s entertained those conversations for two big reasons – the potential tax revenue benefits he’s seen elsewhere in Texas; and because ordinarily, a project like Oneida 2 would’ve been welcomed in any of the pockets of brush and plain where people don’t actually live.
“We’re struggling with tax rates and increases and stuff. In the proper location, it would be well-received,” he told me. “The issue is, it’s right next to a residential area.”
Indeed, Oneida 2 would’ve been smack dab up against Rolling Hills, occupying what project maps show would be the land surrounding the neighborhood’s southeast perimeter – truly the sort of encompassing adjacency that anti-solar advocates like to describe as a bogeyman.
Cotton also told me he wasn’t notified about the project’s existence until a few weeks ago, at the same time resident complaints began to reach a fever pitch. He recalled hearing from homeowners who were worried that they’d no longer be able to sell their properties. When I asked him if there was any data backing up the solar farm’s potential damage to home prices, he said he didn’t have hard numbers, but that the concerns he heard directly from the head of Amarillo’s Realtors Association should be evidence enough.
Many of the complaints against Oneida 2 were the sort of stuff we’re used to at The Fight, including fears of fires and stormwater runoff. But Cotton said it really boiled down to property values – and the likelihood that the solar farm would change the cultural fabric in Rolling Hills.
“This is a rural area. There are about 300 homes out there. Everybody sitting out there has half an acre, an acre, two acres, and they like to enjoy the quiet, look out their windows and doors, and see some distance,” he said.
Ironically, Cotton opposed the project on the urging of his constituents, but is now publicly asking Xcel to continue to develop solar in the county. “Hopefully they’ll look at other areas in Potter County,” he told me, adding that at least one resident has already come to him with potential properties the company could acquire. “We could really use the tax money from it. But you just can’t harm a community for tax dollars. That’s not what I’m about.”
I asked Xcel how all this happened and what their plans are next. A spokesperson repeatedly denied my requests to discuss Oneida 2 in any capacity. In a statement, the company told me it “will provide updates if the project is moved to another site,” and that “the company will continue to evaluate whether there is another location within Potter County, or elsewhere, to locate the solar project.”
Meanwhile, Amarillo may be about to welcome data center development because of course, and there’s speculation the first AI Stargate facility may be sited near Amarillo, as well.
City officials will decide in the coming weeks on whether to finalize a key water agreement with a 5,600-acre private “hypergrid” project from Fermi America, a new company cofounded by former Texas governor Rick Perry, says will provide upwards of 11 gigawatts to help fuel artificial intelligence services. Fermi claims that at least 1 gigawatt of power will be available by the end of next year – a lot of power.
The company promises that its “hypergrid” AI campus will use on-site gas and nuclear generation, as well as contracted gas and solar capacity. One thing’s for sure – it definitely won’t be benefiting from a large solar farm nearby anytime soon.
And more of the most important news about renewable projects fighting it out this week.
1. Racine County, Wisconsin – Microsoft is scrapping plans for a data center after fierce opposition from a host community in Wisconsin.
2. Rockingham County, Virginia – Another day, another chokepoint in Dominion Energy’s effort to build more solar energy to power surging load growth in the state, this time in the quaint town of Timberville.
3. Clark County, Ohio – This county is one step closer to its first utility-scale solar project, despite the local government restricting development of new projects.
4. Coles County, Illinois – Speaking of good news, this county reaffirmed the special use permit for Earthrise Energy’s Glacier Moraine solar project, rebuffing loud criticisms from surrounding households.
5. Lee County, Mississippi – It’s full steam ahead for the Jugfork solar project in Mississippi, a Competitive Power Ventures proposal that is expected to feed electricity to the Tennessee Valley Authority.
A conversation with Enchanted Rock’s Joel Yu.
This week’s chat was with Joel Yu, senior vice president for policy and external affairs at the data center micro-grid services company Enchanted Rock. Now, Enchanted Rock does work I usually don’t elevate in The Fight – gas-power tracking – but I wanted to talk to him about how conflicts over renewable energy are affecting his business, too. You see, when you talk to solar or wind developers about the potential downsides in this difficult economic environment, they’re willing to be candid … but only to a certain extent. As I expected, someone like Yu who is separated enough from the heartburn that is the Trump administration’s anti-renewables agenda was able to give me a sober truth: Land use and conflicts over siting are going to advantage fossil fuels in at least some cases.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Help me understand where, from your perspective, the generation for new data centers is going to come from. I know there are gas turbine shortages, but also that solar and wind are dealing with headwinds in the United States given cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act.
There are a lot of stories out there about certain technologies coming out to the forefront to solve the problem, whether it’s gas generation or something else. But the scale and the scope of this stuff … I don’t think there is a silver bullet where it’s all going to come from one place.
The Energy Department put out a request for information looking for ways to get to 3 gigawatts quickly, but I don’t think there is any way to do that quickly in the United States. It’s going to take work from generation developers, batteries, thermal generation, emerging storage technologies, and transmission. Reality is, whether it is supply chain issues or technology readiness or the grid’s readiness to accept that load generation profile, none of it is ready. We need investment and innovation on all fronts.
How do conflicts over siting play into solving the data center power problem? Like, how much of the generation that we need for data center development is being held back by those fights?
I do have an intuitive sense that the local siting and permitting concerns around data centers are expanding in scope from the normal noise and water considerations to include impacts to energy affordability and reliability, as well as the selection of certain generation technologies. We’ve seen diesel generation, for example, come into the spotlight. It’s had to do with data center permitting in certain jurisdictions, in places like Maryland and Minnesota. Folks are realizing that a data center comes with a big power plant – their diesel generation. When other power sources fall short, they’ll rely on their diesel more frequently, so folks are raising red flags there. Then, with respect to gas turbines or large cycle units, there’s concerns about viewsheds, noise and cooling requirements, on top of water usage.
How many data center projects are getting their generation on-site versus through the grid today?
Very few are using on-site generation today. There’s a lot of talk about it and interest, but in order to serve our traditional cloud services data center or AI-type loads, they’re looking for really high availability rates. That’s really costly and really difficult to do if you’re off the grid and being serviced by on-site generation.
In the context of policy discussions, co-location has primarily meant baseload resources on sites that are serving the data centers 24/7 – the big stories behind Three Mile Island and the Susquehanna nuclear plant. But to be fair, most data centers operational today have on-site generation. That’s their diesel backup, what backstops the grid reliability.
I think where you’re seeing innovation is modular gas storage technologies and battery storage technologies that try to come in and take the space of the diesel generation that is the standard today, increasing the capability of data centers in terms of on-site power relative to status quo. Renewable power for data centers at scale – talking about hundreds of megawatts at a time – I think land is constraining.
If a data center is looking to scale up and play a balancing act of competing capacity versus land for energy production, the competing capacity is extremely valuable. They’re going to prioritize that first and pack as much as they can into whatever land they have to develop. Data centers trying to procure zero-carbon energy are primarily focused on getting that energy over wires. Grid connection, transmission service for large-scale renewables that can match the scale of natural gas, there’s still very strong demand to stay connected to the grid for reliability and sustainability.
Have you seen the state of conflict around renewable energy development impact data center development?
Not necessarily. There is an opportunity for data center development to coincide with renewable project development from a siting perspective, if they’re going to be co-located or near to each other in remote areas. For some of these multi-gigawatt data centers, the reason they’re out in the middle of nowhere is a combination of favorable permitting and siting conditions for thousands of acres of data center building, substations and transmission –
Sorry, but even for projects not siting generation, if megawatts – if not gigawatts – are held up from coming to the grid over local conflicts, do you think that’s going to impact data center development at all? The affordability conversions? The environmental ones?
Oh yeah, I think so. In the big picture, the concern is if you can integrate large loads reliably and affordably. Governors, state lawmakers are thinking about this, and it’s bubbling up to the federal level. You need a broad set of resources on the grid to provide that adequacy. To the extent you hold up any grid resources, renewable or otherwise, you’re going to be staring down some serious challenges in serving the load. Virginia’s a good example, where local groups have held up large-scale renewable projects in the state, and Dominion’s trying to build a gas peaker plant that’s being debated, too. But in the meantime, it is Data Center Alley, and there are gigawatts of data centers that continue to want to get in and get online as quickly as possible. But the resources to serve that load are not coming online in time.
The push toward co-location probably does favor thermal generation and battery storage technologies over straight renewable energy resources. But a battery can’t cover 24/7 use cases for a data center, and neither will our unit. We’re positioned to be a bridge resource for 24/7 use for a few years until they can get more power to the market, and then we can be a flexible backup resource – not a replacement for the large-scale and transmission-connected baseload power resources, like solar and wind. Texas has benefited from huge deployments of solar and wind. That has trickled down to lower electricity costs. Those resources can’t do it alone, and there’s thermal to balance the system, but you need it all to meet the load growth.